ken's blog

We recently surpassed the 1500 browser & devices threshold, a huge milestone for us! The engineering effort involved in providing all these browsers across a wide breadth of operating systems and physical devices takes people and patience... and we were getting crowded. New digs were desperately needed, as we had new hires working off of cardboard tables (just joking...). We found a great location just down the street from our current office at the time and settled on it quickly.

You may be aware that yesterday morning, CrossBrowserTesting’s service was briefly interrupted by a DDOS attack. Starting Tuesday morning, we were alerted to a failing test in our system. We quickly came to the conclusion that we were under a DDOS attack. With only minimal downtime, we were able to bring our services online at around 8am. However, the attack intensified and service speed and reliability degraded again even further. We deemed the problem was easier to fix by taking our services off-line and did so around 3:00 p.m. eastern.

We are happy to announce we are now part of the SmartBear Software family.

Who is SmartBear Software?

Glad you asked. SmartBear builds software quality tools used by more than four million software professionals and over 25,000 organizations in 194 countries. They are the folks behind the popular testing tools TestComplete and SoapUI, as well as the killer open source API definition platform Swagger. Impressive, right?

What’s going to happen to CrossBrowserTesting?

CrossBrowserTesting.com is now served via https. Both the app (https://app.crossbrowsertesting.com) and the main site (https://crossbrowsertesting.com) have been modified so they are served by default over secure https. Our default method sending the live test data and running local tunnels was already using wss (WebSocket Secure) connection, so the entire service is now communicated via encrypted traffic.

We have released a CrossBrowserTesting plugin for Selenium Builder that allows you to record interactions with your site and play them back against any of the selenium enabled browsers at CrossBrowserTesting. This makes it easy to get started with Selenium scripting - you just point and click to record your script, saving individual scripts or test suites. You can then choose to execute these scripts against our remote browsers. To get started, check out http://crossbrowsertesting.com/faq/how-do-i-record-and-run-selenium-test....

We are a big believer in browser testing on the real devices, thus we offer real iPhones, iPads, and Android devices - not just simulators. Hosting these in a traditional server rack, however, is a challenge. As we have grown, we have evolved our techniques. We started out with dish racks. Yes, dish racks. Sitting on shelves in our 42U racks. Dish racks held the devices separate, similarly to the way it holds plates apart so they can dry, and worked pretty well for tablets (not so great for phones). You could put around 15 to 25 devices in a given shelf, and 4 shelves in a cabinet.

You can now test your page layout on a wide range of real, physical Android devices via our screenshot engine. We have been busy enabling Appium to run against our banks of physical Android devices, and this is now being used by our screenshot engine. This includes the following devices:

Updated screenshot UI to better show comparison to your base browser - automatically spot layout differences from the screenshot result page. In glance, you can see the number of layout differences for each screenshot in respect to the base browser. Switch the base browser from this screen also.

Have you ever needed to test layout and functionality of mobile browsers on real mobile devices, but didn't have the budget or time to buy and maintain your own hardware? Our Live Testing for Android solves that problem.

Launch and switch devices in seconds. Test actual Android devices, not emulators — they are more accurate, faster (MUCH FASTER), and run all the browsers, including the stock Android browser, Chrome, Firefox, Opera Mobile, Dolphin, and more.